Page 5 of The Living and the Dead

“How did you get them?”

“It was when I was helping Killian with his cabin yesterday. We were hauling a bunch of debris and I scratched myself.”

—

Back in the car, Siri studied her notepad, the brief notes she had taken. Then she wrote one more word and circled it, as if to indicate a working theory of sorts:

lying

2

Later, when the course of events was known and people in the village tried to understand how it could have happened, lots of them thought back to this very meeting. There, around the kitchen table at Sander’s house, in Siri’s interview with him on the morning of December 18, 1999, they saw some sort of beginning.

Each story needs a designated starting point. In some cases, we can all agree on an unambiguous inciting incident, as if it were possible to travel back in time and finally say: here. This is the precise moment when the hands of the clock begin to move.

But here, that isn’t so. In order to uncover what happened to the boys from Skavböke, each of us must settle on a vantage point from which the events can be observed.

Perhaps that vantage point wasn’t with Sander or Killian, or even Jakob Lindell, but with the brothers, Mikael and Filip. Or Madeleine, or even Felicia. After all, someone must be the guilty party.

Or is it all of them? The whole village, in fact. Small towns sometimes have a voice of their own. Perhaps a town can also destroy itself, if worse comes to worst.

The people who move in and out of the pages of this story muddle the picture, disrupt thoughts. That’s what they’re meant to do, even though we might wish they wouldn’t. The story doesn’t care about wishes or ideas, none of that. Instead, it offers a cast of folkswho speak and act, who give witness statements both false and true, who reject and elevate one another. Some withdraw and don’t want to be seen, yet continue to operate in silence. Their actions, in turn, recur as ripples in the lives of completely different people.

Yes, so it seems.

Might as well start with the interrogation, then, as we’ve done.

Or possibly: somewhere entirely different.

Perhaps at what seems like the outskirts of it all.

Indeed, that too is a beginning. To begin with a missing teenage boy and how Siri Bengtsson, three years after the incident in Skavböke, left the police force.

3

It all started with a raid on a homeless encampment. They’ve always been around, dotted here and there throughout the country in forgotten, out-of-the-way places. By the late ’90s, and the start of the new millennium, they had grown in size and number.

No one in the encampments actually wanted to cause much fuss, but still, given the clientele, violence and addiction were common issues. This was the place for those whom modern society had chewed up and spit out: the evicted and ostracized, the sick and poor, addicts and aging petty thieves. If they bothered average citizens, the media and the police heard aboutit.

This particular encampment was located deep inside Halland, between Fegen and Djuparp, and had long been left to its own devices since only those who were lost would ever end up there. One hot August morning in 2002, Siri was summoned there, along with a dozen colleagues from Halmstad and Falkenberg.

Their task was simple: shoo the poor bastards away and tear it all down. If any of the officers found purpose or pleasure in the assignment, it wasn’t obvious.

They could see glimpses of the encampment between the trees. Trash and litter lined the path through the woods: syringes and old socks, blankets, paper bags, and rotting cardboard boxes. They couldsmell the dank stench of piss and shit. Low murmurs in the distance blended with the buzz of the late-summer insects.

“Fun’s over,” one of Siri’s colleagues said joylessly.

Living in the camp were about a hundred people, men and women, young and old. Some resisted; a few even lashed out, but most of them acquiesced willingly. They gathered their belongings and scattered, sad and ashamed.

A young man was watching Siri from across the area. He was hovering along the edges of the encampment as he put on a shirt; perhaps he’d just washed up. When their eyes met, he grabbed a backpack and headed into the woods.

As if he’d been prepared. No one tried to stop him.

Siri saw his back vanish among the trees and had the strong sense she’d seen him before. But he was quite far already, about fifty paces through the forest, in her estimation, and she couldn’t be sure.

“Do you know who that was?” she asked several of the residents. “The guy with the backpack, who ran off?”

Hardly anyone responded. Those who did speak up didn’t have much to say.